On Wednesday I wrote the article friends have told me to write for years. It tells how I suffered from depression between the ages of eleven and thirty-one, and the miraculous way I came out of it. I know a lot of people who struggle with depression, though not a lot of them talk about it openly. I know very few people—in fact, I can't think of any offhand—who have gone from deep depression to zero depression as I have. So I believe my story has value. I want people to read it. I want as many people as can be helped by it to read it.

You could be reading it right now, except that I haven't posted it here. Why not?

Answer: I don't know why not. Frankly, I'm wavering between the worlds of print and online publication. Come, waver with me a spell.

Print

Print publication has several advantages over online. If I publish my article in a magazine, for instance, they might pay me. Now with an article on depression, payment seems like a piddling issue—rather mercenary, really. If I were writing about trends in men's haberdashery over the past 50 years I would expect to be compensated. But writing an article about depression is a giving thing, a healing thing. I'm not above taking money for my work, but if money were the only obstacle it would be no obstacle at all.

Generally speaking, print magazines pay and websites don't (or do only through indirect means—more on that later). All other things being equal, payment is an advantage of print.

Clout is another big advantage. If you tell someone, "I just had an article published in Relevant magazine," they know you've achieved something special. If you tell someone, "I just posted an article on my blog," they say, "So'd my mother." Online "magazines"—with a few exceptions—don't fare much better than blogs in the Great Chain of Clout that society tacitly upholds. I've had a few articles on Relevant's site that didn't appear in the magazine. Appearing on their site is worth something, but not as much as appearing in the paper version. Print is your respectable older uncle—he's getting a bit past it, but he's got moneybags and he still talks the best game in town.

Print magazines and newspapers will continue to diminish in the face of online competition. Books, however, will remain unthreatened by their online variations for a long time. I want to publish books, and that means I have to impress book publishers. So I care about where my articles appear.

Circulation can be an advantage of print. Many magazines have tens or even hundreds of thousands of readers. Though not every reader is guaranteed to read every article, if you get an article into a magazine, you've got a shot at thousands of eyes. In my own experience, blog posts rarely receive as many as 1,000 readers. So all but the most popular blogs reach fewer people than magazines do.

I can't ignore print. The promise of payment, clout, and circulation make me want to keep trying to get my articles into magazines. But there's more to this story than meets the eye.

The Few, The Proud

Magazines sound great until you realize how few there are. Last spring I took a class in journalism. Our first assignment was to identify potential markets for our work. I had always believed there were hundreds of magazines that might publish my writing on Christian topics. In truth, there are somewhere between two and six.

That's because the vast majority of magazines are highly specialized. If I was a Seventh Day Adventist I could shoot for the Seventh Day Adventist magazine, but I'm not so I can't. If I was interested in writing sermons for busy pastors to copy and pass off as original to their hapless congregations, I could target one of several magazines that specialize in this racket, but I'm not so I won't. If I were a graduate of any of a number of universities or seminaries, I could get published in their magazines, but I'm not so I can't. If you take a list of all the Christian periodicals in existence, then scratch out the ones that are exclusive to certain group memberships, that feature highly specialized kinds of writing, that have very small circulations, or that are just plain weird, the resulting list consists of about ten magazines. But then each of these are specialized as well. I could write for Today's Christian Woman—I could! An article on depression, for instance—but normally my thoughts don't significantly cross paths with TCW's editors. Christianity Today is not highly specialized, but good luck getting published there. The CT editors have to actually watch you being circumcised in order to consider you for publication. By a certified freemason. It's in the masthead.

So for me that leaves Relevant—which is right down my alley, actually—New Man, Discipleship Journal, and uh... well, those.

If my mission in life were to see my articles in top-tier magazines, I would find a way. I would figure out what lower-tier magazines want and write that. Then once I had accumulated some under-clout I would cash it in to get the attention of top-tier magazines, figure out what they want and write that.

Here's the rub: I don't care. I am not a journalist. I am not even a writer. I'm a person who lives and thinks and stares and studies and teaches and thinks some more. My words are the polished poop of those activities. If I see a compatibility between what a magazine wants and what I like to think about, I'm happy to find a compromise there and write something suitable for the magazine. But I can't find the motivation to climb the writerly ladder, churning out whatever is needed in a broad area of interest just to see my articles in print every few months. I like to set my own agenda for what I think and write about.

My desire to follow my own muse in writing combined with the small and specialized world of print magazine publishing means I'll only get published rarely, if at all. There are simply too many constraints. Thus the appeal of the online world, where constraints are all but missing.

Democratic News Aggregation

If I decided to publish my article on depression online, it would take me about ten minutes. That's quite a bit faster than the several months it typically takes with a print publication. I would post it to my blog, then advertise it via reddit and Digg. Even if the article was absolute rubbish, I could bank on at least twenty visitors reading it in the first hour. If those visitors liked it they would upvote/digg it, ensuring its propagation to more visitors. Potentially, tens of thousands of visitors could catch wind of the glory of my article and, within the space of a few hours, flood my site to read it.

The impact of democratic news aggregation services (like reddit and Digg) on publishing is nothing short of revolutionary. I've been with the web since NCSA Mosaic; I've seen lots of nifty fads come and go; I am not one to wax lyrical on the Power of the Internet. But democratic news aggregation (DNA) is really something special. The word "Gutenberg" wants to slip in here, but I'll avoid the cliche. Point is: DNA fundamentally improves the way idea-producers move their ideas to idea-consumers.

In the past, when an idea-producer (for instance, a writer of an article like myself) wanted to get his idea out into the world, he had to go through one of a relative few idea brokers: newspapers, magazines, book publishers, TV networks, record labels, art dealers, film studios, game publishers. These idea brokers did everything. They screened out "unsuitable" ideas (though their idea of "unsuitable" might not match yours). They picked out the "best" ideas. They packaged them up with other ideas as well as paid advertising, then marketed and sold the package to consumers.



This isn't such a bad system—after all, the world lived with it for 500 years—but it certainly had its problems. It put a great deal of power in the hands of a few to decide what the public should and shouldn't see. But speaking more sympathetically, it left brokers with an incredibly difficult job. In a world where thousands of great ideas are spawned every day amid millions of inferior siblings, idea brokers had to constantly pick through the muck to find the stars. I'm told book editors go through hundreds of book proposals per week, yet only publish a few a year. Record company A&R reps comb through dozens of CDs a day, most of them ear-splitting rubbish.

So consumers lost because idea brokers often made bad—sometimes pernicious—decisions. Idea brokers lost because they were constantly awash with crap. And idea-producers lost because they discovered they were Legion—each of them a single, tiny, humiliated voice among millions.

The arrival of sites like reddit and Digg announced the death—or at least the gradual marginalization—of this system. It's the old strategy of dumping the middleman. Actually, in this case the middlemen didn't entirely disappear. Rather, they were replaced by software that distributes the task of sorting through muck to hundreds of willing consumers, effectively promoting them to micro-editors. Now it's not the magazine editor that decides what gets published, but an ad-hoc focus group of readers momentarily formed to evaluate articles. If they like an article, the software shows it to a wider group, and so on and on. If they don't like it, it dies on the vine.



There are major societal advantages to this system (though risks as well—subject for another post, I think). When voters are the media, they can no longer complain about media bias. But as an idea producer I benefit from this system as well. Before DNA services came along, when I posted a blog article I could only hope that a search engine found it and popularized it. This almost never happened, at least to me. Now I can submit my articles to DNA services and receive an instant, fair assessment of the article's appeal to ordinary readers. If people like it, they come. The more people like it, the more come.

The Joy of DNA

Back in March I posted an article on Paul's use of the word skubala in his letter to the Philippians. I sent it to reddit on a whim, and within hours it had received over 200 votes and 20,000 visits. Reddit readers tend to be atheist Bible-bashers and they liked hearing that the Bible contains the word "shit." Many of them also liked the deeper message about legalism and grace. They upvoted and left comments. The article found its public.

How else would that article have gained a readership? A Christian magazine editor would have roasted me on a stake rather than published it. A secular editor simply wouldn't have cared. But readers wanted the article, and reddit helped them find it. That's the promise of DNA services in a nutshell.

When my article on skubala went large, I enjoyed some of the benefits of print. Twenty-thousand readers is good circulation, even by print standards. I gained a little advertising revenue, which meant I got paid (though very little). But there were other benefits that print couldn't have offered.

When visitors read my article they came to me. That meant I could watch their traffic patterns and statistics. My site, not a magazine, gained their praise: if they bookmarked my article, they bookmarked me. They read other articles I'd written. I was the publisher; I was the host; I gained direct contact with readers.

Best of all, visitors could comment on my article, giving me instant feedback on how it struck them, what they thought and liked and hated. With a print article I might get a few letters to the editor over the course of several months. With my blog post I got scores of comments in a matter of hours. For anyone who cares about how his writing impacts readers, comments are priceless, and print really can't compete in this area.

How Cool is Democracy?

None of my subsequent posts have done nearly as well as my article on skubala. In the last couple of months my articles have received between 60 and 400 views each.

I value those individuals who do read my site. But honestly, when you've had 20,000 visitors in a single day, 400 a month is a bit of a letdown. This is the downside to DNA services: they're too damned fair. You only get mind-blowing numbers of visitors when you blow visitors' minds.

That's OK. I'm not asking for people to read my stuff against their will. I expect myself to write well in order to be read. But there is a problem with DNA services that is interesting, and it's part of the reason I haven't completely dismissed print.

The problem with democratic news aggregation services is that they are democratic, and democracy sometimes sucks. Take reddit for instance. Although reddit is democratic, the "society" of reddit—the body of voters registered with the service—is highly idiosyncratic. Reddit users tend to be left-wing, technical, and anti-Christian. Articles with a rightward (or even centrist) slant tend to get hammered. Articles about Christianity tend to do badly (unless they're ridiculing it). The trick with my skubala article, though I didn't intend for it to come across this way, was that the article seemed at first glance to bash Christianity, but actually had a strongly Christian message.

I write about Christianity quite a bit, and what I've found is that the democracy of reddit, as well as Digg, doesn't care to read about Christianity. Articles on Christian topics generally do badly on DNA sites. If Christians use reddit and Digg, they don't use them to find Christian material.

My particular niche is Christianity, but anyone writing about niche topics will do poorly on DNA sites. The greatest writer in the world on the topic of quilting will never get a hearing on reddit even if thousands of reddit users love quilting. It's what you learned in Civics class: majority rules, minority rights. With DNA services, the majority rules. But there is no court system, no defense for the niche. The minority is crushed.

"So," you think, "why don't Christians, quilters, and other freaks open their own reddit/Digg-like sites to help them find good articles?"

Well, it turns out there are two such sites for Christians: GospelShout and blogs4god. I have two problems with these sites. First, although I often write about Christianity, I rarely write specifically for Christians. When I post to a Christian-only site, it feels like self-ghettoization of the worst kind, hiding my work from non-Christians and lite-Christians who would enjoy the work but would never visit such places.

Second, these sites are beyond lame. A front page story on Digg often receives more than 1,000 votes. Front page stories on GospelShout typically have three—you heard me—three votes. Blogs4god does slightly better, with leading stories gaining as many as six or seven votes. These sites get little traffic.

Welcome to My Pain

I began this article by inviting you to waver with me over the question of whether to send my article on depression to print magazines or to post it to my blog. Here's another data point: I actually sent the article to an editor at New Man on Thursday. He said he loved it, but turned it down because it was written from a first person rather than third person perspective. It's not in the style of his magazine. Hey, that's fine; I value stylistic consistency.

There's one other magazine that it would be great for: Relevant. Except that I've sent quite a few good ideas to Relevant over the last several months, and though I've published a few pieces through their online arm, their print arm has never even replied to my queries. Maybe they'd reply this time. In a month. Or three. Or when we see each other in heaven. Or I could just post the article and send it to the DNAs in minutes. I reckon it could get some traction on reddit, maybe. Unless it's deemed too spiritual. In which case it will stagnate on my site, blessing the occasional lonely wanderer who happens to run across it via a Google search for "depression miracle dark.crystal".

What do you think? Any advice? I'm all ears.

The Jot & Tittle (DTS's student newspaper) published this profile of Dr. John Reed in its summer edition. Here it is for your online viewing convenience.

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John Reed hesitated as he stared into the mirror—somehow, he had forgotten how to shave. He dressed, then wandered into the living room. His daughter Beth phoned, but he couldn't put a sentence together. Sensing something was wrong, Beth raced home and took him to the emergency room. Then a seizure gripped him—Reed, 80 years of age, was in real danger. "I was on the edge. It had to be a matter of hours," he recalls. The surgeons operated on his brain, finding and repairing a ruptured vessel that had pressurized his brain cavity with blood.

Two weeks later, he greets me at the door of the house he has shared for thirty years with his wife Erris. He shakes my hand and leads me to a chair. I watch, surprised, as he lifts a nearby table and lamp and shifts them out of the way, then sits in the chair opposite. It's hard to believe this man came near to death so recently. His recovery seems miraculous.

Hundreds of friends around the world—many of them pastors—prayed for him in the days following his seizure. You may never have heard of John Reed, but you've heard of some of the pastors he trained: Joe Stowell, Timothy Warren, Ramesh Richard, Tony Evans, David Jeremiah—the list goes on. "No one knows the name 'John Reed,'" says former student Greg Jenks, "but when his daughter Becky died a few years ago, attending the funeral was a Who's Who of evangelical ministry."

Reed worked as a professor in the Pastoral Ministries department at Dallas Theological Seminary from 1970 to 1993, spending much of that time as chairman. Now he leads the Doctor of Ministry program, continuing to train both new and experienced ministers.

Dr. Tony Evans, who now pastors the 7,500-member Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship, says Reed had a profound influence during his years in seminary. "Dr. Reed was the first person to welcome us when we came to DTS in 1972," he says. The seminary had only admitted three African American students up to that point, and Reed gave Evans a much-needed sense of belonging. "He was a great encouragement," says Evans. "He added heart to a lot of the truth I was learning."

Jenks describes Reed as a pastors' pastor. "John is known for his insight as a mentor and encourager. He has the uncanny ability to know what's going on in your life without having to ask. He knows how to bring you along without being too direct."

Derrick Jeter, whom Reed mentored in the early '90s and who now works at Insight for Living, agrees. "He was the proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove—he gave tough and pointed criticism but in a way that made you want to accept his critique," he says. "I always think when I talk with Dr. Reed, this must have been what it was like speak with Jesus."

Reed's success as a pastor of pastors has made him one of the most influential and beloved figures in evangelical ministry. Perhaps his speedy recovery is due, in part, to the many Christian leaders who, in the weeks following his seizure, let God know they can't afford to lose him.

Confronting Limitations

I ask Reed how he got started in ministry. His answer: "When I was young, I was very shy. People made me uncomfortable. But when I was 18, I experienced a call to ministry. It came about one winter, sawing lumber. My dad was a very quiet person. We would go to the woods in the morning and he would say, 'Good morning,' and at the end of the day he'd say, 'Let's go to the barn.' We didn't talk. It left me with a lot of time to think. And as I thought, I felt a compulsion to ministry."

But Reed faced a serious barrier: stage fright. Whenever he got in front of an audience, his knees shook and his whole body trembled. He decided to face up to this limitation and conquer it, so he looked for opportunities to get in front of audiences. At Cedarville College he got a job introducing and closing a TV program called Chalk Talk. "We never did any retakes. And after two years, I was totally relaxed and free in front of a camera. I'll look in the big blue eye anytime."

He also worked to develop his preaching skills. In churches where he spoke, he asked individuals from the congregation for feedback. One of the things they told him was that he needed to smile more. "I had to learn to express joy through my preaching," he says. He became a student in rhetoric, eventually earning his doctorate in communication.

This once-shy boy shepherded churches in Indiana, Ohio, and Texas for 37 years, ending up as senior pastor of Sherman Bible Church, which flourished under his leadership. Then he shifted into the role of seminary professor, helping to train new generations of pastors and preachers.

His love for the pastoral office is infectious. "I could listen to sermons day after day and week after week. I love working with people, bringing them on, encouraging them. I've been professor and I've been pastor, so I know them both. But the power is in the pastor of the Lord's church. That's where the influence is."

Overcoming Inferiority

Reed's battle with stage fright was only the first in his campaign to overcome his limitations. Despite his easy, confident exterior, a sense of inferiority has haunted much of his life. When he came to Dallas Seminary in 1970, Reed found himself alone, isolated, and intimidated by fellow professors who had graduated from the seminary and knew the original languages intimately. "I'd see S. Lewis Johnson and Bruce Waltke come into chapel with their Greek and Hebrew Bibles bound together, then get up and preach straight out of the original languages! I felt unworthy."

In his early years at Dallas he slipped into depression. "One Saturday night, I was driving home, picking out a bridge abutment to drive my station wagon into, and I realized I was suicidal. I told Erris, and it scared her. There weren't any counselors then—no chaplain—and I had nobody to talk to because I didn't know who I could trust." He realized he had to analyze his situation and find a way out of the darkness.

Then it hit him. The seminary had hired him to train pastors, not to expound the ancient languages. He was good at what he loved to do, just as other professors were good at what they loved to do. Their expertise complemented rather than overshadowed his.

Though the crisis passed, he continued to feel inferior. "The faculty would meet every Thursday afternoon for one or two hours. I was so frightened of those people, and I'd just sit there. If I ever said anything in that meeting, I would have prayed about it, thought about it, written it down—and I got a reputation for being wise." Reed laughs. "I've never told them that I was intimidated, not wise."

Have these feelings of inferiority ever disappeared? "It never goes away. It never, never goes away. It's usually my first impulse—all I know now is how to check it. I am inferior, I just don't want anybody to know it."

Close to the Edge

I ask him about the seizure, his brush with death. "I had to lie on my back for three and a half days and let the rest of the blood drain out. It was a horrible experience. There was no pain—just the restraint: I can't sit up, I have to lie just like this." He stiffens to show the discomfort.

When did he realize he had come close to dying? "When my doctor said, 'You were pretty close to the edge, John.' I was shocked. I thought, 'Boy I sure have left things a mess.'"

Is he afraid of dying? "I'm ready to go. I don't have any problem with it. My daughter died in 2002 of brain tumors. I thought about her when I was lying on my back. No, I don't fear death at all, but it was premature for me.

"I'm okay. I'm not depressed. I'm a happy person. I enjoy life. My father lived to ninety-nine and a half, so I'm targeting one hundred and ten."

A Pastors' Pastor

Reed looks forward to writing Civil War novels after retiring from seminary. But I have a hard time believing he will ever fully abandon his passion for cultivating Christian pastors. As Derrick Jeter says, "He is one of the few men I would consider a great soul—loving his Lord and his students more than himself, committed to training excellent preachers of the gospel for the glory of God." Since hearing God's call in the stillness of a winter forest, he has fought through his limitations to become the finest of pastors' pastors. Training fellow shepherds is deep in his soul.

Now he leans forward and fixes me with his eye. "What's God calling you to?" he asks, then leans back in his chair. Before I can answer, he sets the hook: "Or does God still talk to people? Do they get quiet long enough to hear Him?"

Relevant published my article How Video Games Taught Me about God this week on their online portal. It appeared there in an abbreviated and sanitized form. For the full, raw, uncut version, read on.

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Let's make a game. Let's you and I sit down together and invent our very own video game. Then we'll show it to our friends, put it up on a website, and people all over the world will play it.

What sort of game should we make? Should we design a strategy game, a puzzle game, a role-playing game, a massively multiplayer game—yeah, how about a massively multiplayer game? Let's make something that will bring people together and help them connect.

What should we put in our game? What features can we think up that promote relationships between players?

First we need a way for people to talk. We'll add a chat window so players can type messages to each other. But relationships take more than words. Let's allow players to choose their faces and expressions. That way they can express their personalities and emotions: solitary or sociable, grumpy or jolly.

Now players can communicate, but they need more to do than stare at each other and talk. They need activities. Let's make it so they can build things: statues, houses, machines—anything. Each player will start with a few parts that they can stick together—bricks, wheels, motors, axles, windows, gears. They can combine their parts with other players' to build bigger and better things than a player working alone could ever make. A single player could build a unicycle, but a couple of players could build a bike, and a team of players could build a bus. This sounds good—our design begins to take shape.

Will Wright, the brilliant designer of Sim City, The Sims, and Spore, defines a game as "a series of interesting decisions." Our design already meets his definition. By giving players building blocks and letting them put them together in a variety of combinations, we've envisioned a world that rewards ingenuity. Some players will team up to build artwork—replica of the Statue of Liberty, anyone?—others to build functional things like shopping carts and bulldozers, others to build instruments of destruction like battering rams and catapults, and others to run markets for rare parts or handy devices. I imagine a noisy, exciting, talkative world full of players making, using, and trading things. We have ourselves the core of a good game.

You and I have just done what I do for a living. I develop video games. I helped make Ultima Online, Brothers in Arms, Halo PC, and Phit. If you haven't played one of my games, ask your nephew—he probably has.

Christians often ask me why I—a Christian—would work in a godless, immoral, child-corrupting industry like game development. Not wishing to disappoint, I give them the usual excuses: to shine light in the darkness, to fight the corruption from within, to bring the gospel to geeks and artists. The real answer is more complicated. For me, making games is an exercise in experimental theology.

We Create Worlds

When I started my career twelve years ago I worked for Origin Systems, developer of Ultima Online. Origin's slogan boldly asserted, "We Create Worlds." We loved that slogan; it captures the power and allure of making games. In a very real way, game makers fashion worlds like little gods would.

The word "game"—with its offhand, childish overtones—fails to capture what games really are: virtual worlds. Game designers create vivid, living places. You can visit them, explore them, even live in them. Not long after we released Ultima Online in 1997, we discovered that many players spent upwards of 12 hours a day, every day, inside the game world. We heard of divorces caused by players' gaming addictions. We had created a world that appealed to many players more than the real world did.

The Good Game

As I design games, I keep rediscovering how God's world resembles a well-designed game. Sound ridiculous? J. R. R. Tolkien, that greatest of modern mythologists, once described God as the ultimate Myth-Maker. God, he said, authored the True Myth. Like any myth, the True Myth has plot, events, characters, heroes, and villains. Yet it lives and breathes: you and I dwell in its pages. In much the same way, the real world resembles a game. It is the Good Game, designed and programmed by the ultimate Designer.

How does the real world resemble a game? A game poses challenges, leading players into interesting decisions. Likewise, the real world confronts us with choices and responds to our decisions. Video games have instruction manuals and strategy guides to help players excel. Likewise, God has provided us with the Scriptures to teach us the objectives, rules, and hints (and even some of the cheat codes) to help us excel in the Good Game. The mastermind behind Ultima Online, Richard Garriott, entered his own game as a player named "Lord British." Similarly, the mastermind behind the Good Game entered as a player named Jesus Christ.

A Series of Interesting Decisions

As Game Designer, God has total control over every element of his Game. If he says the sun will shine, it shines. If he says players should blink every few seconds, they blink. If he wants to teleport a player named Philip, Philip goes zipping through space. But in a game—unlike a book or movie—players should have some control. Their choices matter. Much of the skill of game design lies in crafting rules that limit what players can do while granting them freedom. The Nintendo character Mario can jump high, but only so high. He has power within limitations. We see the same principle in God's Game. He grants us, his players, control within the boundaries he defines.

Because players have freedom to do what they want, game designers influence players in indirect ways. A good designer suggests what players should do, rather than forcing them. For instance, many games flash the health bar when your health gets low. This warns you of danger but leaves you free to ignore it: you can carry on picking up bonus points if you choose to take the risk. In God's Game, hunger has a similar effect. By requiring us to eat, God wakes us up and gets us focused on the world around us. We choose when and what to eat, but God's Challenge of Hunger puts the choice in front of us. Without hunger, we would spend our lives yawning and daydreaming—why bother getting out of bed? Hunger lets us know from the opening moments of the Game—from our first seconds of life—that we have something at stake, that we have to play to win.

We all know the rule that nobody lives forever. Death horrifies us, yet serves a good purpose: it tells us we cannot win God's Game through material gain. With one, simple rule, God makes clear that health and wealth fall short as the currency of success—even the healthiest and wealthiest players die and decay. Incredibly, many players ignore this basic, undeniable truth. Jesus' parable of the rich fool who toils for wealth only to lose it with his life illustrates what happens when we forget the Challenge of Death (Luke 12:16–21).

The Challenge of Sex

More than any other game element, the Challenge of Sex advances God's desire to teach players how to love. Yet our distorted views of sex blind us to the genius of its design.

Game designers will tell you that if you want players to work together, you have to entice them. Players prefer to work alone unless cooperation pays off. To promote cooperation, designers give players complementary abilities. In a role-playing game, for instance, archers excel in long-range fighting but succumb to close-range attacks, whereas swordsmen excel in close-range fighting but succumb to long-range attacks. To survive in the widest variety of fights, archers and swordsmen wisely team up. By designing each type of player with strengths and weaknesses, designers encourage players to join forces.

God's strategy for cultivating relationship follows a similar principle. He begins by making half his players male and the other half female—two complementary types. He rewards physical contact between these types with orgasm—the greatest immediate pleasure his creation has to offer. This gives an immediate incentive for every player to connect with a player of the opposite sex. On its own, the thrill of orgasm fails to ensure relationship, but it does get players focused on each other—a move in the right direction.

Next, God attaches the process of childbearing to the sex act. Producing children offers another of the greatest rewards in the Game, and both males and females naturally want children. God designs children to need protection and training, a difficult challenge for parents. This challenge brings players into real connection with their mates: players who want the best for their children must commit to work together with their mate, communicate about their children's needs, and agree on difficult choices for nearly twenty years. A couple pursuing these challenges moves toward true relationship.

Yet men and women differ so greatly, not only physically, but in appetites, outlook, and psychology. God designed this challenge too—not to frustrate our relationships, but to perfect them. The tension between men and women rests on a key imbalance. While both a man and a woman can enjoy the sex act, the woman carries the baby.
Pregnancy—the very thought of it—gives the woman a different perspective from the man. For her, a single moment of closeness can transform her body and change her life. She needs help raising a baby and wants a man who will stick with her. This need for commitment leaves her yearning for deep personal connection before, during, and after sex. The man, with less at stake, takes a more immediate approach. Instinctively he knows he can enjoy a woman, then leave her, so he needs less emotional connection. Yet he benefits just as she does from raising healthy children. Both the man and the woman enjoy the benefits of children and consistent sex only if they commit to a life-long partner. They have similar goals but dissimilar outlooks. Through the design of our bodies, God has posed a challenge that guides us toward marriage and deep relationship.

We often respond to this design with resentment rather than joy. Men complain about reticent wives, women complain about overeager husbands, and the "battle of the sexes" rages on. But God never poses a puzzle we can't solve (1 Corinthians 10:13). He has created us to win at the game of love (Genesis 2:18–24). When we trust him, we see that God gives us these challenges to teach us intimacy. Because men and women look at sex differently, we fully enjoy the benefits only when we commit, communicate, compromise, and—ultimately—love one another. Like the best game designers, God keeps us engaged with wonderful rewards that help us press through the hardest lessons. We choose whether to keep on striving for success or to give up hope. But we must remember that God's Game Manual gives two key instructions: "Love the Lord your God" and "Love your neighbor." If we truly want to win God's Game, marriage provides the best training.

The Grand Design

The great Calvinist creed known as the Westminster Confession states the ultimate objective for players of God's Game: "To glorify God and enjoy him forever." God draws us, his players, toward that objective through hunger, which reminds us we have something at stake; death, which reminds us that victory lies apart from material gain; and sex, which challenges us to work out the puzzle of true love. They represent just three of the many features he designed to grow us and help us succeed. When we look at his world as a Game, we discover a beautiful design full of subtlety and wisdom, crafted for our growth and enjoyment.

In the churches I've been involved with over the last twenty years, I've seen a kind of mass deflation. It's not the churches that have gotten smaller, it's the people. Churchgoers attend less regularly. They give money less consistently. A smaller and smaller core serve a larger and larger clientèle of punters. When I meet people on Sunday mornings, many seem furtive and desperate. They avoid eye contact. They talk in generalities and stick to safe topics—"Awful hot out there," "Rangers seem to be picking up this year." They love Jesus, apparently, but won't talk about him. Sometimes I feel like I've landed in a spiritual horror movie where it's the good guys who have become the zombies, The Night of the Dead Living.

I see Christians struggling to explain what puts the "Good" in Good News. We each remember some poignant moment when we "accepted Jesus," "got saved," and our lives began to turn around. But for many of us, somewhere along the way, our lives stopped turning around. We stopped drinking but not smoking. We stopped sleeping around but not looking at porn. We stopped cussing around the office but not around the kids. We gave up greed but can't get out of debt. We learned how to love, but still got divorced. Where, we ask, is the abundant life that Jesus promised?

So now we drift in and out of our churches, hoping against hope that someone will have some answers. We sing worship songs we've long since stop feeling. We rub shoulders with brothers and sisters but the love of most has grown cold. Pastor's got lots of nice things to say, but they don't amount to the crowbar we need to pry our lives back into shape.

In the last ten years, a string of writers has diagnosed the church's problems and offered solutions for how to fix it. George Barna produces a wealth of data exposing the heart rate and blood pressure of a sickly North American Christendom and advances his own prescription for how to heal it. Brian McLaren and others have founded the emergent movement trying to get the church back in step with a rapidly changing culture. I've just been reading Reggie McNeal's The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church, which exposes the moral and practical failure of the megachurch movement and pushes a "missional" approach. Some friends of ours are starting a family-based church that upholds the nuclear family as the center of God's work on earth. Christian pundits have advanced 101 suggestions for what is wrong with the church and how to fix it. My heart is drawn to these writers and ideas because I'm aching—really aching—about the condition of the church and yearn to see it revived.

But I don't believe that anyone has uncovered God's official new way for doing church—not Barna, not McLaren, not McNeal, not nobody. And I don't think we'll uncover what God has in store until we give ourselves the time to become truly empty.

Emptiness. That's my contribution to the discussion. Emptiness.

Solutionism

It's amazing how few people even realize something is wrong with the church. Those who do realize it often don't understand their own thoughts and feelings—"Why am I so unhappy on Sunday mornings?" "Why don't my Christian relationships seem as open as they used to?" "Why doesn't anyone else see what I'm seeing?" And when we tell others what we're feeling, we're often rebuffed.

A few years ago I pointed out to my then-pastor that our local church had become a revolving door where visitors left as quickly as they arrived. I suggested what we needed was not more churchgoers, but deeper churchgoers. His goal was to pastor a megachurch, and he wanted to crank up the appeal of Sunday morning music and sermons in order to draw in the masses. So he didn't appreciate it when I pointed out that finer showmanship on Sunday morning would only promote a thinner, shallower, less committed congregation, not a deeper one. Evidently something about this suggestion tweaked him because he reacted aggressively, accusing me of arrogance (a tactic he used many times against the many people who questioned him over the years that followed). His hostility shocked me, but since then I've seen it again and again. The last people to accept that the church is in trouble are the people who have the most to gain—or think they do—by carrying on with business as usual.

The result of this hostility is that we who question the health of the church quickly find ourselves alone and misunderstood. Our isolation opens us to many temptations: defensiveness, divisiveness, insensitivity, and—indeed—arrogance. I'm not saying Brian McLaren is arrogant and self-absorbed, but have you seen his book, A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN? You don't get that way—the way I'm not saying he is—without fighting for change alone and unsupported for a lot of years. When people do begin to agree with you, you feel vindicated and relieved—jubilant, even. You feel ready to find a solution and fix the problem—stat.

Loving a wounded church hurts. It hurts to see the church hurting. The hurt can draw us into desperation. So when we see a chance to help the church, our temptation is to jump at the solution without too much discernment. "Corporate model? Emergent? Missional? Family-based? Pick whatever buzzword you got and give it to me," we say. "Anything would be better than this."

But of course: no. Many things would be worse than this. And when we uphold solution X as God's New Way of Doing Church, we subscribe to something much worse: we love the solution rather than God or the church.

This is the catch with the umpteen new models for How Church Should Be. They are all about The Problem and The Solution. But there is no one problem and there is no one solution—there is only Jesus and his Bride struggling to love one another. When we forget that, we fall into solutionism and worship the fix rather than the Lord who gives it.

Say I'm a disenchanted middle-aged pastor. I've been reading church health books and going to conferences for years, struggling to grow my church and see it shine with spiritual vibrancy. Sometimes I see growth, yet our vibrancy continues to dim. Or a growth spurt occurs, but then diminishes as our members siphon off into the megachurch down the road. Finally, starving to see real ministry happen, I crack, declaring, "This is not how church was meant to be!"

I wander lost and alone, but finally come across a writer who says what I've been thinking all along. I'm not alone! I discover that just the sort of decay I've seen has happened in churches around North America. My writer-guru and I agree: the church is sick and needs healing. But what do we do about it?

It's at this point we make our mistake. We immediately search for The Fix—the New Way of Doing Church—and in our desperation quickly find it. When we do this, we skip a step, the all-important step of Emptiness.

Emptiness

When God takes someone from one place to another, he often brings them through a time of emptiness. This happened with my wife and I when our marriage was on the rocks. Our old way of relating to each other—the childish, selfish way we had practiced since dating—collapsed into resentment and bile. We desperately needed to learn how to love each other as God intended. Yet he let us wallow for a while in brokenness. After we had despaired of each other and turned our tearful eyes upon him, he didn't immediately give us bright feelings of delight and service for each other. He let us wallow, not out of cruelty, but in order to let our old ways fully drain from us. Only when we had become truly empty did he begin to build up the new ways.

Emptiness is part of transition. We see it in Christ's forty days in the desert, his time of preparation for ministry. We see it after the Exodus in the desert wanderings as the sands of Egypt fell away and God prepared Israel for the Promised Land. We see it in Job's despair, in Paul's years in Arabia, in John's isolation on Patmos.

God does not like to put his treasures into cluttered vessels. He likes to clean out his vessels—slowly, thoroughly—before depositing his treasures into them. It makes good sense for him to do this—the vessels would not gain by being stuffed with jumbled oddities, and his treasures deserve a fitting home. Yet it's very painful for us. When we give up our old ways—old habits, old ambitions, old securities—we're filled with longing for the new ways. Yet it's at that moment that God "deprives" us (so we think), and we begin our wait—the long dark night of the soul.

Jesus didn't burst from the tomb the moment he was placed into it. Between the crucifixion and the resurrection is the long silence of Jesus' death. What incredible terror and doubt the disciples must have gone through! But their emptiness no doubt had a purpose: to prepare them for the changes to come. Likewise, the Holy Spirit didn't come at the moment Jesus ascended. There is emptiness between the Ascension and Pentecost.

So it is with the church now in its dark and stumbling days. We're praying for rescue, for revival, for God to show us where he wants the Bride of Christ to go. But this transition is too big for an easy answer or one-size-fits-all solution. No doubt God is calling his church to be culturally relevant, missional, and family-oriented. But why stop there? Mightn't God call us to rediscover worship, or prayer, or spiritual gifts? Perhaps his "new direction" for the church will involve rampant persecution or widespread poverty in a collapsing global economy. I don't believe we'll experience God's revival until we empty ourselves of all expectation, of all solutionism.

Witnesses

It's funny, because the one model of church that everyone admires—the first church as illustrated in Acts 2—is the one model nobody is quite willing to follow. We all want to break bread in our homes and eat together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. But who wants to go to church every day? Who wants to form a commune in which we all sell our SUVs and pool our incomes? How do we really feel about our apostles freaking us out with miraculous signs on a weekly basis?

We admire the Acts 2 church, yet fail to emulate it, because it represents a reality we're too afraid to embrace: the reality of people who have truly been changed by Jesus. Christ calls us to be witnesses to who he is and what he has done. Being a witness is easy: you see something, you say you saw it. The problem many Christians have is that we haven't really witnessed Christ doing much. We've read about him but haven't experienced him. So we don't have much to say, and our Good News comes across to non-Christians (and ourselves) as neither new nor especially good.

We can talk about revival, but until we can talk about what Christ has done for us, what business do we have fixing his church? We don't need a new model for church. When we let Christ change our lives so deeply that we can't stop talking about it, we'll be living the new model. Then revival will come, and we won't be able to stop it.

I've had a few print articles published this summer that I want to tell you about.

"Anchored in Deep Waters" is the article I co-authored with Eva Bleeker on the ongoing Katrina recovery effort, published in Kindred Spirit.

The seminary student newspaper Jot & Tittle published my profile on DTS professor John Reed a few weeks ago. On the back cover of the same issue is my cartoon, "A Seminarian's Guide to How to Hold Your Face on Campus." The Jot & Tittle is available only in print, but I'll post these items here when I can.